I guess I was wasting my time. Consider this:
“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."That's a hot new 17 year old German author, commenting on the disclosure that whole pages of her hot new novel were, er, lifted from someone else's hot old work.
I used to have a reporter working for me who would retype entire AP stories to use them on the air. Not rewrite, retype.
It has been difficult for me to undertsand why the concept of "sampling" in Hip Hop music isn't, er, stealing?
Isn't everything in the old song being "sampled",a creation of an earlier writer? Each of the phrases, each refrain and chorus, an original creation from his or her mind based on life's experiences?
Why is it OK for them to rip it off to sell their work?
Maybe it really is a generational thing. Maybe the hot new teen Hemmingway won't mind if I take her hot new novel and add a few choice lines to it, and then sell that new authentic work under my own hot new author name. Tym Linnax.
*Xerox is a registered trademark of the Xerox Corporation
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]
It's a difficult line to establish. I don't know much about the specifics of this particular case of potential plagiarism, but if this is a piece of fiction or verse, I'm less inclined to find fault with it.
ReplyDeleteIt really depends on whether or not the author created something new artistically instead of merely stealing. I couldn't help but think of T.S. Eliot's famous quotation:
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."*
I'm sorry, plagerism is plagerism. If Doris Kearns can be taken to task for plagerism, and if Alex Haley could be taken to court to answer to allegations that he lifted portions from another author is his writing, then this young author is stealing.
ReplyDeleteI'm like you, Tim, I don't understand this "sampling" deal in music today, either. I think the original writers should be getting a cut of those music royalties. (Except in this digital online age, I guess those royalties are shrinking from so much stealing music off the internet).
It's a low down dirty shame.